Underscoring our industry's trend toward inevitable continental drift, big-board traded Ciber and iGate Global Solutions, a subsidiary of U.S.-based iGate Corp., on July 1 announced they are planning to form an India-based joint venture to offer software services, including applications development, enterprise application support and IT outsourcing services.

Microsoft's leap into identity management will help reduce some of the chaos corporations are coming up against as they try to manage multiple user accounts and passwords in mixed environments, channel partners say.

T -Systems made a bold statement last month when it held the grand opening of its new headquarters in downtown Manhattan. In addition to a guest list that included several high-profile local politicians and tours of the lavish new office space, the move itself was highly symbolic--T-Systems' new home formerly housed AT&T.

The solution-provider community lost one of its own recently when Michael S. Schweitzer, founder and president of The RAM Group, died unexpectedly on May 4. He was 61. Schweitzer, who founded the Toronto-based solution provider in 1983, passed away following a stroke, according to the company.

In a recent interview with VARBusiness, IBM software chieftain Steve Mills said something both mildly shocking and somewhat amusing. Software companies, he said, are nothing more than a "cultural wasteland." Asked to elaborate, Mills posited that firms such as Oracle (yes, he singled out Larry Ellison) are only interested in selling you software, then moving onto the next opportunity.

At Ingram Micro's recent VentureTech Network spring event, Bob Stegner, vice president of channel and U.S. marketing at Ingram Micro, delivered a blunt message to VARs in attendance: VentureTech Network (VTN), an exclusive group of more than 300 SMB-focused solution providers, was not meeting the company's expectations.

Oracle's bold land grab for applications rival PeopleSoft is sure to play itself out tortuously during the next several weeks or months as the lawsuits fly as fast as the overheated rhetoric. With the outcome still anybody's guess, the proposed deal is breeding uncertainty among the two companies' tens of thousands of resellers, integrators and strategic partners. And don't forget JD Edwards' partners. At first, they only needed to worry about the proposed acquisition by PeopleSoft.

James Gosling, rightfully, is referred to often as the father of Java. A member of the Sun Microsystems design team that wrote and implemented the now-ubiquitous programming language, Gosling has helped put a public face on the open-platform movement. But while Java has gone on to define the de-facto development environment for distributed enterprise applications, Sun has not emerged the market leader in J2EE platforms or tools.

Talk about a growth spurt: After acquiring Comark in April 2002, Insight effectively doubled its size and helped solidify its position in the solutions--not just products--marketplace. Although Insight is not quite done with its transformation into a new-age solution provider capable of supplying more than 200,000 IT products from 1,500 vendors, with world-class services to thousands of customers to boot, the company has made remarkable progress. At the end of last year, it nearly cracked the ranks of the Fortune 500, finishing at No.

Inflection points. The make-or-break moments that come along only a few times in the life of a technology, industry or company. This is the story of how Enigma chairman and CEO Jonathan Yaron recognized when he had reached one of those fateful moments, and how he decided to go with a J2EE-based platform. It all happened three years ago during an annual review of Enigma 3C, the independent software developer's suite of Windows-based support-chain applications for aerospace, automotive and other manufacturing clients.